Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony LoRe.
Hi Tony, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
I started on this path as a volunteer and eventually realized that this was the life that was calling me.
Below is the biography that we have been using, but underlying this information are hundreds of stories showing how I learned and grew and brought the organization along with me. Not sure if this format allows me to come back to this page or provides questions to prompt those stories. So, we’ll see how this goes, and I’ll provide addendum information if appropriate.
Biography – Tony LoRe, CEO & Founder, Youth Mentoring Connection
Tony LoRe, known as the “Mentor to the Mentors,” is the visionary behind Youth Mentoring Connection (YMC), a transformative youth services organization based in Los Angeles. After a successful career in business, Tony discovered his true passion: guiding and empowering young people. He made the bold decision to sell his business and devote himself entirely to connecting at-risk youth with caring mentors.
Since its inception in November 2001, YMC has impacted the lives of over 8000 youth in the Los Angeles area. Tony’s approach blends ancient wisdom with modern youth development practices, resulting in structured programs that consistently produce remarkable outcomes. Through initiatives like Rites of Passage, Healing Circles, and specialty programs such as Film Making and the Stoked City Surf Camp, Tony and his team facilitate transformative experiences for youth, fostering healing and growth.
Under Tony’s leadership, YMC has achieved extraordinary results, including a 93% high school graduation rate and over 70% college enrollment, significantly higher than the historical averages for the communities served. His innovative methodologies have even led to the dismantling of three gang sets.
Tony’s impact extends far beyond Los Angeles. He has trained mentoring agencies across California through the California Governors Mentoring Project and has seen his methods replicated worldwide, from Singapore to Peru. In 2019, Tony was invited by the government of Singapore to launch their national mentoring movement and conduct master trainings for key youth services agencies.
Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, Tony remains committed to his mission of empowering youth through mentorship. While volunteerism has declined, YMC continues to innovate new ways to foster vital mentoring relationships, ensuring that the core principles of its model endure.
Tony LoRe’s dedication to the youth of Los Angeles and beyond has transformed countless lives, including his own. He recognizes that the greatest gift of mentorship is often the personal growth it inspires in both mentor and mentee…
Addendum:
There have been many turning points and moments of truth along the way.
Initiation Rites on the Mountain:
One major turning point was when I found myself working with a lot of gangs involved, and gang-affected youth and knew that something more than traditional mentoring was needed. I stumbled on an article by Dadisi Sanyika that showed that being jumped into a street gang in Los Angeles followed the same pattern, step by step, as indigenous initiation rites.
So, with the guidance of a variety of my mentors, including mythologist & mentoring expert Michael Meade, Orland Bishop, and West African elder Malidoma Some, we created a modern version of these traditional rites of passage: a group experience with the power to awaken our young people to a deeper sense of their own gifts and life purpose. For the past 15 years, we’ve been bringing youth up to the Big Bear Mountains every October for our Initiation Retreat. This isn’t arts and crafts. This is serious work. So, what exactly do we do up there? First, we tackle a high rope climbing course to help our youth learn to overcome their fears and face new challenges head-on. Then, we tell an old story around the fireplace so that our youth can recognize themselves within it and share their own stories with their peers. We drum. We read and write poetry. We make masks and sing indigenous songs to stir the imagination, to awaken what lies dormant in our psyches and in our culture as a whole. We go on hikes in sunlight and moonlight to remind our youth what it feels like to be outdoors without gunshots and sirens disturbing their peace. We cry, laugh, scream, and cheer each other on, and when darkness falls on our last night together, we step into ritual space and ask the elemental forces of nature to help us let go of what most needs to be shed so that we can continue to grow. This could be a plunge into frigid waters, or facing a huge fire and offering something that needs to be burned away, or an earth ritual where we release our pain into the earth, etc.
Old Wisdom and Practices:
From this inspiration, I have been led into traditional and native practices that strongly resonate with our youth. It seems to be buried in their bones, and wanting to reconnect to their psyches. So, we help young people (as well as us mentors) find guidance through Native Medicine Wheel Practices, Council Practice, Sweat Lodges, and other methods to connect to old wisdom. It’s more imaginative than “trauma-informed care,” but it’s actually an old version of trauma-informed care.
Surfing Saves Lives:
Another turning point was when Alan Scott, a Santa Monica Bay Street surfer connected to the original “Z Boys” (see the documentary “Dog Town and Z Boys”), contacted me and said, “I was a raging teen and surfing saved my life.” He then asked me to partner with him to give back what had been given to him. Our surfing program was born, and we’ve since discovered that surfing is one of the most effective therapies for releasing trauma and waking up our spirit. We like to say that nature is a powerful mentor. Just a couple of weeks ago, in a closing circle on the beach, one of our youth said, “Surfing saved my life”. Because of this program I actually became a surfer at 54 years old. This program helped get me and many of our youth through Covid.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Oh my no! Nothing this important is ever a smooth road. The vital breakthroughs come from the fringes, and you don’t work effectively with very wounded (traumatized) youth without a lot of struggles along the way. Starting “from the go”!
Who the F*#! Are You?
I was a fish out of water. Coming from suburban “John Birch Society” Orange County, I found myself standing in front of a classroom of youth from South Central Los Angeles in the early 2000s when gang activity was still very hot in the hood; as a relatively successful businessman, I was recruited as a volunteer for an entrepreneurship program at Manual Arts High School. They were offering high-risk youth an opportunity to receive a microloan to start their own business. The businesses ranged from a car washing service to DJing to a brilliant young man who purchased a baseball pitching machine to rent out his time helping youth baseball teams run their practices. I thought I knew how to talk to youth. I helped raise 6 younger siblings and coached youth sports. But the raw authenticity of these young people was a different story.
“So, I entered this classroom in a gang-heavy part of South-Central Los Angeles and stood in front of a dozen and a half youth. In the midst of my well-intentioned lecture on success, from the back of the room, I heard a young man yell out, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ It was a jolt to my system, stripping away my preconceived notions and exposing my vulnerability. But this boy’s question was raw. It was real, and it touched me deeply. I felt vulnerable. And in that moment, something shifted in me. What he meant was, ‘Who do you think you are disrespecting us like that?’ What I heard was, ‘how can you help us figure out who we are if you don’t even know who you are?’
It didn’t just shake me up; it woke me up.
So, I reset. Instead of the authority figure, I became Tony, a fellow human being eager to understand and connect with each student on a human level. Their stories, their struggles, became my curriculum. I learned that respect wasn’t earned through age or experience but through authentic connection.
In relinquishing my scripted role as the teacher, I embraced a new dynamic of mutual learning and respect. It was a journey of self-discovery as much as it was about guiding these young people toward a brighter future. This was the first step in a journey that led me to sell my business and devote the rest of my life to working with youth from neighborhoods that were foreign to me but so vital that I never felt so alive as when engaging with these young people.
And this interplay between the concepts of ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’, both stemming from the same root ‘author’, would help shape my work and my mentoring model.”
One of my greatest struggles was when Youth Mentoring Connection (YMC) faced the brink of closure, a situation familiar to over 50% of nonprofit organizations teetering on the fiscal cliff. It’s a system that is really built to keep you there. Despite evading such financial troubles for a decade, a convergence of setbacks, including unexpected funding delays and an unstable economy, pushed us to the edge. I realized that I have a knack for keeping things alive that I should let simply die. If had closed the doors five years prior and started over again, I would have probably been able to use the energy that I had put into holding this thing together to build something even stronger. So, I decided that I would shut down YMC. It was the hardest decision that I ever had to make. However, just as I was poised to shutter YMC, a profound moment unfolded during a program session called Echo. It is a monthly deep conversation, a place where young people and mentors can come and tell their stories in a safe, supportive setting. This was shortly after Trump had become president. One after another of our Latino youth broke down in tears telling stories of ICE raids and fear that their parents wouldn’t come home at night or simply fear of going out in public, while our black youth voiced their own struggles. In this vulnerable space, Marquis, who had turned to YMC when his world collapsed after the death of his mother, stood up, pointed at me, and said,
“I vouch for him. He will always be here for us.”
Then he called out each of my staff that were in the room and proclaimed that,
“They will be here for us.”
He continued:
” Whenever things get so bad that I don’t think I can take another step, I take enough steps to just get to YMC because I know they’ll always be there for me. If it wasn’t for YMC, I’d be dead now.”
So, I knew I couldn’t close it down. Fundraising is probably my least favorite thing to do, but with the motivation of that young man’s belief in us underscoring our importance to the community, I went on a fundraising blitz, securing an additional $160,000 within six months. Taking a calculated risk, we hired a seasoned grant writer to pursue substantial government grants. This bold move paid off, propelling YMC onto solid ground and enabling us to purchase our own building and realize our long-held dream: Urban Oasis, a safe haven for vulnerable teenage youth.
Undoubtedly, the pandemic presented immense challenges. While virtual mentoring cannot replicate the depth of in-person connections, we adapted, extracting valuable lessons to enrich our post-pandemic initiatives. However, one of our sector’s greatest hurdles remains the scarcity of volunteers. That’s even more pronounced for YMC because prior to the pandemic, the majority of our mentors came from worksite mentoring programs where we would bus the youth to the workplace to meet their mentors.
Before the pandemic, our worksite initiatives thrived, fostering impactful mentorship relationships. The problem is people didn’t come back to the workplace, and many of those programs dried up. Even though our metrics show our mentoring programs to be the most effective employee engagement strategy, return to traditional workplaces has been slow. Some workplaces are coming back on board. But it’s slow going. Rest assured that we remain undeterred and are working on new innovative ideas for attracting and engaging more mentors.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I have done everything necessary to run an innovative, soulful, and compassionate youth mentoring organization in South Central Los Angeles that I founded in 2001.
Things I aspire to:
o Keeper of the Vision
o Servant Leader
o Storyteller
o Bringer of Healing Practices
o Facilitator of Transformational Practices, Retreats, Programs in nature
o Architect of Innovative Mentoring models
o Advocate for Healing Centered approaches to working with wounded youth. (We use the word “wounded” because the word “trauma” tends to sound too clinical and moves us away from the imaginative and innovative.)
Some of the things I do:
o I developed and continue to refine our unique mentoring model, called Gift Centered Mentoring. We shine a light on youth gifts and care for their wounds.
o I personally Facilitate our Annual Boys’ Initiation Retreat in Big Bear, which is patterned after indigenous initiation rites. My partner in this work for over 20 years, Juliana Wells, leads the Girls’ and non-binary retreat.
o I personally facilitate our monthly deep conversation Gathering called Echo, which includes grounding practices, storytelling, and poetry readings and encourages youth and adults to tell their own stories, share what has ‘wounded’ them, and participate in the healing that comes from the community.
o I personally facilitate our weekly surf therapy program
o I lead weekly staff check-ins, which include meditation, Council Practice, and other grounding practices, as well as discussion prompts to help keep our culture strong.
o I run Native Medicine Wheel Ceremonies for our youth, mentors, and have done them for other organizations.
o I’ve done the finances, fundraising, and admin. I’ve mentored youth and trained staff, trained and consulted other organizations all around the world how to run mentoring programs.
o I run Financial Literacy Workshops for youth and mentors.
o I also consult with other agencies and have hosted delegations from over 30 countries who have come to learn about our mentoring model. This has led to replication of our Gift Centered Mentoring model in the entire country of Peru and in Singapore, where I was asked to launch.
I’m proud of the very unique, innovative and soulful approaches that I’ve pioneered in the field of youth mentoring and all the lives we’ve touched in the process.
I’m proud of my team of the most compassionate, soulful, dedicated youth workers you can find. Some have been with me for 10, 15, and 20 years in a sector that has traditionally high turnover.
I’m proud of our results. We stopped 3 nascent gang sets, have created exceptional graduation rates and improvements in self-esteem, and have countless testimonials from youth about how we helped them change their lives. We have heard many, many times, “If it wasn’t for YMC, I’d be dead now,”… and mentors who say that they volunteered to help youth but found that they gained as much as the youth.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you, or support you?
1. Become a Mentor: since the pandemic, volunteerism is down precipitously. Thus, we have a pressing need for mentors in our general programs. Your guidance and support can make a significant difference in the lives of at-risk youth. 2. Surf Mentors: This summer, we will be recruiting surf mentors for our Surfing Program. You don’t need to be a great surfer, and we train you how to instruct.
2. Financial Support: As we expand our reach and impact, ongoing funding is essential. Currently, we’re focused on renovating a building in South LA to establish a safe haven for young people. Your financial contributions directly support our programs and services.
3. Board of Directors Membership: We’re seeking dedicated individuals who are passionate about empowering youth to join our Board of Directors. Your expertise and commitment are invaluable in guiding our organization forward.
4. Partnerships: We welcome collaboration with other youth-focused organizations interested in implementing mentorship programs. Together, we can amplify our impact and reach even more young people in need.
5. Business Partnerships: Businesses interested in fostering employee engagement and making a tangible difference in their community can partner with us to host workplace mentoring programs. These initiatives not only benefit youth but also serve as powerful employee engagement practices.
Pricing:
- Cost to youth to participate = 0
- Cost to mentors to participate = 0
- savings per youth kept out of the juvenile system -$336,000
Contact Info:
- Website: https://youthmentoring.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youthmentoring/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/youthmentoring/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/youth-mentoring
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/youthmentoring?lang=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ByWc9qmEXAyHm0vwjvmeQ
